My Meanderings Through Frankford’s History; The Castors and Hormann

I’ve had too much coffee this morning.  I’m way too caffeinated to be able to write a cohesive narrative about Frankford’s history this morning but I’ve learned a lot.  So I’ve thought of an idea about splitting our history into two kinds of posts, one where I regurgitate the things I’ve learned and the paths of history and the internet to get that learning.  And the other will be a book report.

So this is what’s floating around, I have some pics from my two hours at the Historical Society with Debbie Klak.  One of those pics is of a model of a street car from one of the Castor family.  I’ve got reader Warren who found out the original owner of Blumhaven was F. Hermann.  I heard a nugget that the Greenwoods who built the Globe Dye Works were the original owners of the mansion next door and I’ve got a ghost story to go with it.  You know Horrocks Street?  I know what they called at least one of their houses and some history of the ones that still stand.  Oh and I’ve got picks from the news archives of the first two Frankford hospitals and the family names of the philanthropists who got them started.  You’ve heard of Benedict Arnold?  I’ve got something his wife used to sneeze in.  All of it good stuff.

But what the hell, let’s start with googling for the name of company name for the pic of carriage, Frankford and Southwark.  And boy are people huge into trains so I now have info of Frankford’s place in early 20th century mass transit.  Then I google the owner, Thomas Castor, and find out some good Castor family history.  Now I follow the name Warren came up with and google “Hormann and Frankford” and the second link down leads me to pic from someone named castorbb on webshots.  And just take a look at his albums.  He’s gotta be a Castor decendent because he has a ton of family pics and he has more than a few narratives with his pics.  His Hormann album has a building materials invoice for Blumhaven, plans for Horman’s glass works at Lehigh and Tilton, which I’m absolutely not googling right now cause this will never end.  And why does castorbb, descendant of the Castors, care about F Hormann the original owner of Blumhaven?  Cause Horman’s daughter married into the Castors, here’s the wedding invitation, held at 4651 Leiper Street.  There’s a ton of the stuff in this guy’s ablums, surf through them and check out his descriptions, some of his Castor stuff is really detailed and he even has original pics of Thomas Ellwood Castor’s house on Penn Street.

And now I’m done, I’m throwing up any pics of mine, or ones found on the internet because this post isn’t meant to suplant a proper narrative, which I’ll get to sooner or later.  There’s just a ton of history right there in a half our of googling.  I just want to show where all this stuff comes from.  castorbb’s webshots albums are a real find, check them out through the link below.\

[link]  http://community.webshots.com/user/castorrb